Agreeing the role of the line manager in HR delivery
Agreeing the role of the line manager in HR delivery
By Jo Radford – Senior Consultant at Orion Partners LLP.
The public sector line manager is at the heart of current debate on how to meet the cost challenges ahead and maintain employee engagement through these difficult times. Recent reports, including the CIPD’s Building productive public sector workplaces, have found that line managers in the public sector are often lower in people management skills than their colleagues in the private sector making this mountain particularly hard to climb.
What must you do to get people management and engagement right? When the prize for answering this question has never been greater or more critical to public services – and the gap to be breached seems wider than ever – there is no more important place for HR to be using its energy.
One of the most common problems we have found is that while ‘people management’ is always talked about as being a key part of the line manager’s role, it is the part that is the least well defined. What exactly is meant by people management? Are these things which can be measured, recruited against, used to build training programmes? Do line managers understand what this means in terms of the behaviour required of them, the time they should spend on managing their teams to deliver instead of delivering the service themselves? For the HR function, answering these questions for your organisation can mean the difference between making an impact on the challenges ahead or becoming increasingly irrelevant to the debate.
Solving the problem
Reflect on the current strategy of your organisation: what cost pressures are you under; which parts of the organisation are going to feel this the most; where are levels of employee engagement already low? Once you have gathered this information, ask the following questions to establish what your organisation actually wants line managers to deliver in people management. Don’t waste time and resources up-skilling all managers to be all singing all dancing people management wonders if your organisation has no appetite or need for this.
1. What level of risk and reward trade off in people management will your senior team accept?
This risk comes in two areas. The first is the risk to the organisation of facing unfair dismissal claims and the like because line managers have engaged in disciplinary processes themselves, or the organisation becomes bold in dismissing those whose performance is not up to scratch. If you can accept this risk, there are rewards to be had in not carrying resource in your organisation that does not contribute effectively to your goals. If not, then time and resource must be spent to support managers in disciplinary processes and on lengthy performance and capability management processes. The end result is the same but getting there will cost more, diminishing the reward.
Specifically in the public sector, the second type of risk is that to services themselves. How acceptable are any performance related service failures in your organisation? This tells you how clear you need to make the role of the line manager in managing the individual performance of everyone in their team. It tells you how measurable this management of performance must be (not in terms of review scores, but review standards, coaching standards, follow up actions and so on). Again this directs the support provided to line managers in very specific ways.
For both types of risk, the engagement of your senior teams in answering this question is key. Your organisation and your line managers must be able to see that the decisions they are making are backed up and supported by their peers and their executive teams.
2. What is the willingness to invest in manager capability to deliver people management?
Here the question is not so much about cost (although that is a factor) but about time and if your senior management team will acknowledge that time to build these skills is important and that it should be prioritised. The reward here is a better engaged workforce as well as improved service delivery.
3. What value is placed on the time of the managers spent on people management and the time spent directly on service delivery?
You need to agree if the principle of all managers delivering the same elements of the process should apply regardless of cost. For very critical front line service managers whose time is required for service delivery to do every aspect of lateness investigation may not be effective but to have them spend considerable time performance managing their team may be service critical. So, you must ask where the dividing line should be drawn. In terms of having a consistent culture, you may choose the same approach for the whole organisation, but be clear on your reasons for doing this. Taking a service by service or role by role approach is more complex but may meet your needs for improving services or employee engagement in key areas.
How you answer these questions will have a direct bearing on how your teams are structured and how your line managers interact with employees. Your answers tell you the type and value of the people management training that needs to be delivered and which managers should be priority targets. They tell you what to change in the way you monitor and manage performance standards in your
line managers and the type of support your HR function needs to provide. They will give you the message for your organisation on investment in and prioritisation of people management and how you will support the complex role of managers in front line service delivery.
And the last hurdle to overcome? The view in HR is that you already know the answers to these questions intuitively. You may well be right, but the biggest value of going out and asking them is engaging the thinking power of your organisation on this problem, getting the buy in to do something about it and the understanding that this is a valid place to spend your pressured resources.